Our Story

In 2025, Aircada transitioned its platform from drag-and-drop visual editors to prompt-driven agentic generation.

Sockets & Visual Builder Limitations

Originally, the platform relied on a socket-panel-based system and visual builder for UI. For example, to set up background removal, a creator added a button block, opened its socket panel, and dragged its 'on click' action line to connect to another block's trigger. While functional, this visual line-drawing became extremely messy and unmaintainable as configurator complexity scaled.

The Kazoo Customizer Catalyst

The turning point occurred during the development of the Kazoo customizer. Implementing simple conditional logic—such as hiding Add-on 2 when Add-on 1 was selected—required jumping through complex layout hoops. While trivially simple in code, expressing this in a visual block editor was tedious, proving that visual editors were obsolete for complex e-commerce logic.

Prompt-Driven Agentic Pivot

Aircada shifted to a code-based approach with pre-wired plumbing and guardrails, allowing AI agents to generate code and conditional logic directly from natural language specifications. Hours of visual socket drawing were compressed into a single prompt.

Following the shift to Web 3D, Aircada dogfooded its customizer engine on early client projects to refine features. These initial deployments served as critical validation setups, shaping Aircada's core 3D asset pipeline.

Continuous Optimization

Building bespoke setups exposed rendering bugs, compression bottlenecks, and layout rigidity. Resolving these issues evolved Aircada's visual scene editor into a robust, self-service merchant tool. Some notable configurators built included:

Aircada validated its headset rendering pipeline through an industrial AR pilot with the Gemini Observatory (part of NOIRLab). Electrical supervisor Paul Collins, who had been working on the observatory's 8.3-meter Hawaii and Chile telescopes since 1996, reached out in late 2020 to build a hands-free monitoring system.

Firewall & VTScada Integration

To bypass bad weather lockouts, the team integrated Aircada with the observatory's internal VTScada monitoring network. Paul Collins connected Aircada's founders with Dave Spencer (VTScada) and Eduardo Toro (Gemini IT) to establish a secure connection past the facility firewall.

Predictive Maintenance Overlays

The solution replaced physical checklists. Technicians put on headsets to inspect pumps in real-time, overlaying live motor amperages and historical data graphs. Positional spikes in motor currents immediately alerted operators to glycol leaks or failing bearings.

Technical Recognition

The pilot earned Aircada a presentation spot at the National Science Foundation (NSF) pitch in Washington, winning an NSF award, alongside a presentation and award at the annual PT SCADA conference.

In 2023, Aircada entered the Long Beach Accelerator cohort in California. The program helped transition the founders' industrial positioning background into a commercially viable e-commerce docs.

Pre-Seed Funding During the cohort, Aircada secured a $100,000 pre-seed investment from Sunstone Ventures, providing capital to fund the transition to web-native 3D customizers.

Shark Tank alumnus MountainFlow reached out to Aircada while struggling to deploy a 3D configurator for their plant-based bike bottles. Other agencies had quoted upwards of $20,000 to construct a custom solution, and their previous attempt to hire a developer to customize standard Shopify template apps had failed.

The Lead Form Limitation

Before Aircada, MountainFlow relied on a static lead form. Customers uploaded an image asset, described their layout requests in text, and submitted contact info. This static process lacked real-time previews, limiting conversion rates and causing layout miscommunications.

Platform Validation

Aircada built a customizer supporting multi-logo uploads in different positions, color rules, and dynamic pricing. The configurator boosted conversion rates and validated the business model of embeddable 3D customizers for Shopify.

Despite pilot success, building on Unity became unsustainable when Unity introduced per-user licensing fees. Concurrently, headset fatigue, poor field-of-view, and short battery life restricted worker adoption.

Adoption Barriers & Setup Friction

Field testing revealed industrial headset AR was 5 to 10 years away from mainstream adoption. Asking senior plant operators to wear headsets and document procedures was a difficult sell, especially since many resisted basic smartphone apps. Furthermore, the massive up-front spatial setup required for new hires to gain value created a major sales barrier.

The Catalyst

When Microsoft cancelled the HoloLens 3 and retired the Azure Spatial Anchors program, Aircada pivoted to repurpose its mobile GPU rendering pipeline for web browsers, leading directly to the Pivot to Web 3D.

Wylie Chenoweth leveraged his early college Three.js background to redesign Aircada's engine. The pain of manually coding a boiler configurator for the company landing page highlighted the need for simplified Web 3D asset builders.

WebGPU Core & E-Commerce Optimizations

Focusing on performance from day one, Aircada utilized the WebGPU renderer in Three.js and the Three Shading Language (TSL). This bet on modern device WebGPU support is paired with a seamless WebGL fallback for older devices. The team's legacy headset asset compression pipeline proved highly effective for web-native e-commerce embeds.

Web Studio Launch

Aircada moved its asset pipeline to a web-based docs.studio, enabling merchants to embed lightweight, custom 3D configurators directly into browsers via simple snippet codes.

In 2026, Aircada launched its public developer SDK, opening prompt-to-configurator operations to developers.

Developer Empowerment The SDK allows merchants, developers, and freelancers to generate custom 3D configurators with single prompts, bridging local code overlays with AI-generated spatial environments. Complete documentation on store syncing, operator scripting, and scene control is available in the Aircada SDK section.

Alongside the Sunstone investment, Aircada raised additional early capital during its 2023 accelerator cohort.

SAFE Note Instrument Aircada secured a post-money SAFE note from a Sequoia Capital scout, validating the startup's early 3D rendering pipeline and technical trajectory.

Building reliable industrial AR required precise, persistent coordinate placement. While Microsoft Azure Spatial Anchors provided the baseline cloud structure, devices frequently suffered from one-foot positional drifts, ruining procedure overlays.

Algorithmic Enhancement

To bypass these limits, CTO Wylie Chenoweth engineered a custom caching layer to cache locational data. This custom algorithm fed pre-processed coordinates to Azure Spatial Anchors, speeding up recognition times by 10x and securing Aircada's technical edge.

In 2020, brothers Sean and Wylie Chenoweth co-founded Aircada. Sean was working at Intuit in San Francisco, while Wylie taught industrial automation (SCADA and PLCs) in Colorado. Sparked by testing the HoloLens 1 at CU Boulder, they launched a startup targeting industrial headsets.

Origin Focus & Knowledge Transfer

The early goal solved industrial knowledge loss by storing procedural steps in 3D AR for emergency procedures.